ART IN REVIEW

ART IN REVIEW; Gillian Carnegie

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: March 28, 2003

Andrea Rosen Gallery

525 West 24th Street, Chelsea

Through April 5

The young British painter Gillian Carnegie is working with several current ideas, none of which she takes far or personally enough. Her New York debut is an erratic, overly determined Conceptual installation about painting, in which motif and process trade off and a brainy garishness prevails. A target, for example, can be the subject of a small abstraction or a smearing device that adds a prismatic bravura to a more thickly painted landscape.

In a bit of needless sensationalism, Ms. Carnegie begins each of her exhibitions with a relatively academic painting of her own backside that suggests a parody of Courbet's ''Source of the World.'' Thereafter, she explores the wide-ranging physical possibilities of paint. Her least successful works are several stiff landscapes that tend to move, process-wise, from dark, thick paint at the edges toward lighter, thinner, more brittle treatments at the center. The dark parts are best, suggesting scraped paint and encroaching night, or autumnal decay. Yet up close, they display an obsessive brushstroke-per-leaf precision.

Not surprisingly, the two strongest works, although not without gimmickry, are ones in which dark or thick paint, or both, dominate. An ostensibly modernist monochrome, ''Black Square,'' is actually an expertly built-up forest scene in which, for example, thick wrinkled paint replicates tree bark with startling accuracy. And ''Popol-vuh,'' an all-dark thinly-to-thickly painted still life, also shows promise.

Ms. Carnegie's excursions into the tensions between material, image and process seem indebted to Gerhard Richter, Laura Owens, Lucian Freud, Jasper Johns and Michael Raedecker, which are not bad choices. But most of her paintings are calculated and devoid of pictorial life, which is to say that they barely make the case for their own existence. ROBERTA SMITH